No, it would not. This doesn't work, and neither would a poll. To be clear: we can have an interesting discussion on salaries, value of employees, etc. but if anyone takes any of these numbers, from this post, or a poll, and does so much as average them, they would immediately produce meaningless data. Some reasons:
- Participation is voluntary, the group is self-selected. This in itself renders all results meaningless.
- HN polls let you vote on more than one option, yet you only have one salary.
- Time of day bias. It is currently lunch hour on the east coast, and morning in the Bay area. Remote developers living in the UK, Thailand, etc. are on yet a different schedule.
- Whenever a discussion like this pops up, the workers have an incentive to lie. If you say "I am top talent in my field and I make [2x my actual salary]", and enough people do this, you might actually raise the expectations of the employers. This discussion is actively giving a voice to the workers, and they have a huge reason to misrepresent facts for personal benefit.
I really wish HN got rid of polls. People tend to treat them as valuable data, and they are really just noise. The discussions are great, but the number noise is worthless.